Rethinking the Tables of Contents

Puntitas’ single writerly act of the day has been to move two poems in one of the books to reflect the change she made to the chapbook. As she read over one of the tables of contents to make sure it had updated properly, she realized that some sections make more sense than others, so one possible mission this evening is to rearrange the poems in the books.

She may put it off, however, because she’d like to add at least two new pages to each book. She’s got a couple of drafts, but she isn’t sure whether/where they’d really fit in, and she’s had one idea (complete with closing) that has been eager to get out on the page, but she hasn’t settled on the tone or the beginning. She also has a long poem that is more finished than not, which would really pad out the pages, but she isn’t sure that it will be ready enough by next week, which is when she wants to send manuscripts out. Whatever she does, Puntitas needs to hurry up and decide.

Oh, yes, there was one other writerly event. Puntitas noticed that one poem was one page and two lines long. She tinkered with the line spacing around the epigram, and now that poem and the book it’s in are both one page shorter, Making each collection fifty pages in length.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.

Back to the Mail

Puntitas is in the throes of much writerliness and knitting. About the latter, she’s making a long and flowy cape, probably the longest and flowiest of her collection. Currently rows are about 650 stitches long. By the time she finishes, they’ll be at a thousand.

About the former, she has sent out five more batches of poems. She has reread the individual pieces before printing or emailing. In half the cases, she has been satisfied with the poem and sent it out as is. In the rest, she has revised, cutting or reworking an awkward line or word in some instances, moving or adding whole stanzas in others. Rather than frustrating her as it has previously, the process has felt reassuring, proof that she can read her work objectively and that she does generally like it.

When she reread her Miltonian sonnet, the one that responds to “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” she decided it needed much work. The images she had been most concerned about were the most effective; the ones she’s been comfortable with needed the most work. The conceit in the first two stanzas wasn’t clear enough on a literal level, so she changed it to one that had seemed trite when she was drafting, but now efficient (more expected by the reader) and apt (appropriately descriptive). Initially, she thought that going with the familiar meant falling into cliché, but now she thinks that clichés can be revived with original details and that they can shortcut readers to a frame of mind that is the first step to the ending of the poem, which will hopefully not be cliché.

Now the greatest amount of work is needed in the sestet. Puntitas read both Milton’s sonnet and the passage in Matthew that it eludes to many times while writing her response, and for other readers to make sense of Puntitas’ sonnet, they would need to read both many times as well. Without that background, the octet and the sestet don’t make sense together and her comeback to his last line sounds like a digression. All in all, she can keep half the lines in the last section, but will probably need to do a lot of reshaping.

Oh, and another rejection arrived last week, an optimistic form letter from the North American Review. . Puntitas thought she had exhausted her supply of pending rejections from the previous mailing.

Puntitas reads _The Friendly Young Ladies_ by M. Renault.

Puntitas Has a Writerly Moment

Puntitas engaged in some writerliness today without planning to. She thinks the secret is that she’s starting to obsess about her big interpreter exam, and being writerly is a lovely and justifiable way of avoiding test preparation so as to undermine herself as usual. Really is a pity that Puntitas isn’t better able to turn self-awareness into self-improvement.

Anyway, she was reading a list of calls for submissions to get a general idea about how to organize herself for her next mailing extravaganza. One of the calls for short travel narratives prompted Puntitas to submit four poems that fit most of the criteria, but since she’s well aware (there’s that word again) that long poems and short narratives don’t really overlap for most people, she decided to submit there and then, before common sense killed her delusion.

So Puntitas submitted a batch of poems to a publication that is looking for narratives. She also made a few minor, but necessary revisions to two of the poems in the batch. That meant she had to copy the revised parts of the poems to the official master copy of each and to the book-length manuscripts.

While she was in the manuscript files, she got rid of the dedication pages, which no perspective publisher seems to want to read, added her latest publication to the acknowledgements page of one ms, updated both tables of contents, which took way longer than she expected, and corrected one or two formatting glitches that she noticed.

The other writerly thing she did was compare the recent publication to its unpublished revision. She kept the ending of the published version because it was emotionally stronger than the revision. But she kept the rest of the revision because it made more literal sense and because all of the words in it pointed to the ending, where in the original some words just sort of sounded clever. The problem was that the middle section didn’t point to anything remotely connected to the original ending, so Puntitas had to rework it and tinker with a few details in the final section. She is happy with the poem as it stands now, and since it is officially in print, she will no longer mess with it.

Reading the poems of the batch she submitted today made her feel happy with her work, even though she did have some revising to do. She’s decided she’ll read her book-length manuscripts cover to cover to catch any additional problems. She thinks she’d like to add a few more poems to each (maybe five pages per book), so she’s thinking of drafts and ideas that have been floating around since she officially finished them.

And yes, Puntitas has now accepted that she’s need to make new photocopies of the books, even though she has lots and lots of hard copies left, because lots and lots of poems have undergone minor changes since the big trip to Kinko’s. The lesson learned is that the next time, she will ask for fifteen to twenty copies, not fifty.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez-Revertte.

Penelope and Life Choices

These last couple of weeks have been quietly eventful for Puntitas. After Jerk and Spurt, her sticky handed drain-on-tax-payer-money of a boss, offered his interpreters and translators the chance to sign a three-month extension of the contract he hasn’t bothered to honor for about two years, Puntitas notified him that she wasn’t planning to renew. Since said notification was sent via email, Puntitas wasn’t present when he received it, but she imagines the scene involved wild desktop dancing and choruses of “Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead,” because, a few short hours later, Puntitas’ voicemail included several messages from regulars whom she hadn’t worked with recently, telling her they’d miss her and wishing her luck. Sadly, J&S isn’t as adept at processing contractors’ payments as he is at being petty and useless.

About the decision itself, Puntitas had come to it long before she told her boss, but it was a decision that was ninety percent made, a die that wanted very much to remain uncast. Puntitas genuinely enjoys her work, and she thinks it’s important, so she finds a lot of satisfaction in it, but what convinced her not to renew were the obvious realizations (1) that the contract was being extended only for three months and (2) that J&S would simply continue to ignore the inconvenient parts of the agreement as he has with the current version. Giving notice was an easy decision to make once Puntitas articulated that for herself: if both parties aren’t willing to play by the contract’s rules, signing is an empty ritual.

The process of searching for reasons to renew was slow. Puntitas used her idle waiting room time to knit socks, a pair of anklets with short-row heels she’s near-completed and frogged four or five times since March because they didn’t fit just right or because some technique or other didn’t turn out very well. At some point in all of that, she lost interest in finishing the pair but continued to work on them because knitting small projects that can be picked up and put down at a moment’s notice is the best use of her waiting room time.

So she knit and frogged desultorily, and Penelope came to mind, the woman who spent twenty years weaving and unweaving her work to put off marrying one of the louts occupying her home while her husband had adventures and got laid. Even as a sister fiberista, Puntitas has always thought those twenty years had to have been tedious in the extreme.

But over the last few months, Puntitas has realized that the tedium gives way to an idle kind of curiosity. It’s probably the minds way of engaging with something. Puntitas went from just whipping up a pair of socks; to keeping her hands busy; to trying different pattern stitches, wrapping techniques, cast-ons, and bind-offs; to experimenting with methods for interacting with the work itself (holding the needles, counting the rounds, sliding the loops along the shafts, etc)—all minor variations on more finished results. It became the Zen of knitting with a twist of hyper neurosis.

Puntitas’ haphazard penchant for knitting things with some flaws, but not too many screeching errors, gave way to a desire for perfection (esthetic balance in the stitches used, tidiness of construction in the heels, etc.), , without caring about how long it took to make the socks. Then as she frogged the heel back for the second or third time, she discovered that her sense of perfection had changed, less emphasis on the esthetic balance and more on the tidiness in the heel construction. Last year, she came up with a short-row heel of her own. It does a better job of covering the holes, but it’s not very elegant in its appearance, so she’s been shifting back and forth between smoothing out glitches in the more usual short-row heel and tinkering with her variation.

And all that tinking and frogging gave Puntitas the calm to think about whether to sign the contract or not, and when she finally gave notice, she felt that sense of lightness and relief that indicates it’s the right decision for her, but she’s also scared because … well, she’s essentially quitting her job in the middle of a recession. She’s taken a few steps in the way of preparation by working a little harder at picking up other jobs and other clients, but work will be slow for the next year or so while she builds up a new set of regulars and while something else comes along. Ultimately, Puntitas wants to work for someone other than herself because she wants benefits, stability, and less travel.

The subject of her more recent waiting-room-sock jams has been that one of the positives of leaving a job voluntarily is that the leaving becomes associated with encouraging memories. Several of her regulars have been very sweet, giving Puntitas kind words, small gifts, and even a little party, so she presently feels strong and confident enough to find another job, emotions that she knows won’t last. They’re the same feelings she has every time she sends out a book manuscript or a batch of poems: she is certain beyond a doubt that something will be accepted, but it’s not.

And that’s another thing Puntitas is in a funk about. Her book-length manuscripts keep getting rejected (one or two more form letters since last post), and so do the individual poems (one more letter to a journal she’d forgotten all about). She knows this is part of the game, and she knows she just needs to keep sending out, but she’s feeling no real motivation right now, and she’s feeling entitled to a good sulk about it.

Puntitas reads _The Year of Living Biblically_ by A. J. Jacobs, _Gods Behaving Badly_ by Marie Phillips, and _the Secret Pearl_ by M. Balogh.

Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Revising at This Late Stage

After a couple of months of not thinking about her book-length manuscripts, Puntitas woke up last week with the thought that one of her poems would benefit from the addition of two details. She spent most of the rest of the week distracting herself with other thoughts because, well, the manuscripts are done, but then yesterday, she paused in her distraction to add the details, put the entire poem into the present tense, tinker with the ending, and prune some of the prosier language.

She did hear the sentence, “That’s why it hasn’t been published,” cross her consciousness, and after inserting the revised poem into the manuscript itself (Puntitas revises the individual poem file first and then goes to the book to remove the old version and insert the new), she was glad she’s been too lazy to make new copies of the book.

Puntitas also had the sobering realization last night that save for one or two journals, which escape her at present, she’s pretty sure she’s received rejections from everyone she submitted to in February, so she must send out more poems.

A poet’s suffering is never done.

Puntitas reads _Blood and Guts: a Short History of [Western] Medicine_ by R. Porter, a book which, though readable, informative, and interesting, is nonetheless not as entertaining as the title suggests. In fact, Puntitas might have skimmed and fizzled if she were not reading it for an editing project she’s working on.

The Poetry Reading

The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.

After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.

Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.

Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.

After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!

AT LONG LAST, THEY’RE DONE!!!!!! The final page counts are forty-eight for the first book and fifty-one for the second. Each has four sections, and my publications are fairly evenly divided between the two.

I assembled the second book yesterday afternoon. It was fifty-one pages long, so I moved a one-page poem to the first book, bringing the page total for the first book from forty-seven to forty-eight and for the second from fifty-one to fifty.

The funny thing is that deciding which poem to migrate was not that hard. When I realized I had enough pages to move a poem, my initial happiness was momentarily tempered by the matter of which one. In typical Puntitas fashion, I put off thinking about it while I dealt with a few glitches in the table of contents. Then as I jumped through the manuscript to fix and double check, I noticed that one poem was a little too similar to two others. In one case, both poems end with a female clutching fistfuls of grass. In the other, both are about suicidal thoughts. Oddly, the poem wasn’t a rehash of the others. The closing images have different values (clinging to life vs. fear of change/transcendence), and the reflection leads to different conclusions (pushing a suicidal thought away vs. toying with it). So I didn’t feel that I needed to get rid of the poem altogether, but I did think that moving it to the first book would be wise. Knowing where to move it was also fairly simple. The first had a dramatic gap between two poems, and this one seemed to be the right kind of piece to fill it.

Anyway, about assembling the book in general, the second one went faster than the first (three hours as opposed to four). The process reminded me of sock knitting: making the mate goes faster because it’s more a matter of remembering than discovering.

George (my computer) was well rested and cooperative too. I corrected the page number formatting issue in the first book without any problems, and I went through both manuscripts to make a few minor changes. There were a couple of poems I’d meant to work on, but never got around to, so I read them over quickly, tinkering with a line or two, where necessary.

Though I’m not completely sure, the discrepancy in the number of pages seems to have been caused by the widow-orphan protection feature. In the individual poems, I used soft line breaks (shift+enter) within a stanza and hard line breaks (enter) between them. Because of widow-orphan, stanzas got moved to the next page if a specific number of lines didn’t fit on either side of the page boundary. When I put all the poems into one file and stripped the formatting, the soft line breaks turned into hard lines, so page breaks happened wherever the page happened to end, unless I forced it with the enter key, of course. The reason I’m not convinced that this is the cause is that a couple of poems took up one entire page in the book, but crossed over to the second in its own file.

Today, I returned to the books to do some last minute work. I added a dedication to a couple of poems, and I reread one more poem from the second book to make sure the revisions I made last summer worked. I realized I’d never gone back to double check. After some tinkering, the poem grew by about sixteen lines, crossing a page boundary and getting the book back to fifty-one pages. The amazing thing is that both that poem and one other improved A LOT from relatively little revision. To today’s poem, I added two short stanzas (eight or ten lines) to the thesis version, and to the other one, I added a few (four to six) strategic lines. I made other less noticeable changes as well, but those key additions gave both pieces depth and complexity, bringing to the reader what was in my head when I wrote them.

As a technical aside, I learned yesterday that tables of contents in Word 2003 don’t update automatically. What I’ll do when I’m in an editing sort of mood is add information about that to my post on how to make tables of contents in Word.

The next step is to print the manuscripts out and make photocopies. I’ll do both tomorrow. Most likely I’ll have little or no work on Wednesday, so I’ll work on putting them in the mail then.

Puntitas reads _El llanto de la comadreja_ by E. Navarro.

The Happiness Begins

Just a short note to say that Puntitas is doing the happy dance. All the book sections now have titles. Tomorrow I will start moving the individual poem files into two large book files. I’ll strip the formatting out over the weekend and make up the tables of contents. The books may actually go out in the mail next week! Hurrah!

Oh, well, I’ll have to find places to mail to, of course, but with books in hand, that should not be a problem.

I also sent off two electronic submissions of individual poems, though I was so excited about the first that I didn’t include my personal information. Ah, well, the editors have my email address.

Puntitas is still reading her damn vampire novel.

Counting Down

After much wasteful procrastination, Puntitas has had a productive weekend. She wrote a new poem last night, one of those poems that come of themselves with a little prodding, the kind that can stand and walk and speak in telegraphic sentences when they’re born so they can go into the mail with minimal nurturing at home, and today she has gotten over the last of the hideous hurdles in the damn poem she’s been working on forever—well, off and on since Easter more or less.

Both poems have been interesting experiences. The one I wrote last night was inspired by the Independence Day celebration, which has always struck me as far more Dionysian in nature than Halloween or even Carnival. I’ve never quite been able to explain why that is, but eight years ago, when the good home schooling Mennonite neighbors argued over whether to let their screaming five-year-old go ahead and light a Fountain (Mom was for allowing her in order to teach a lesson about obedience and parental judgment while Dad objected on the grounds that the resulting emergency room trip would ruin the party and spoil all the food), I came close to putting it into words. This year, with all the forest fires and talk of global warming, I found the perfect context. I didn’t write it out there and then because my mother and I were having such a nice time laughing at the neighbor’s silliness and munching on big pieces of fresh fruit, that getting up for the note taker only to tune her out seemed crass. Later, of course, the moment was gone, and I didn’t know if I could recreate the piece.

Sunday night, when I did write it out, the poem was different from what I had imagined. While I remembered the general movement of the piece, I didn’t remember all of the elements that got me from the opening image to the climactic ending. I also didn’t know how to prepare for the final image and overall conceit without giving it away or making the poem feel like a riddle. What I did instead was to suggest the conceit in two places and organize the details to do the rest of the work. I won’t know whether I pulled it off until I read the thing relatively fresh.

One pleasant surprise was the closing image. I couldn’t use the one I had planned and was floundering around for a direction to take the poem when I read what I had and realized it was already somewhere. I did a little tweaking to make the ending less abrupt and went back to work on making the conceit stand out enough. Then I was done.

I hope it’s as complete as I think it is the next time I work on it. There is one image I really like, but I’m nervous about it not quite blending in with the rest of the poem. I can tie it into the general conceit, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll just have to wait to decide.

The other poem has been a struggle. I’ve stuck with it because I really like its potential. I like the idea, the images, and the general narrative arc. Done right, it can turn out to be an excellent piece, but maintaining a balance between exposition and metaphor, resisting bathos, keeping two ideas separate while using one as a conceit for the other—all have been extremely difficult for me. On top of all of that, I’m not sure that I have the right life experience to write it. It’s about marriage, and I’ve based it on conversations with and observations of some of my married friends, but having never been married or involved with anyone for a long period of time, I’m nervous that I may not be true to the speaker’s feelings.

During our last tussle, I did some rearranging. That made for a stronger draft, but it also created a massive gap that called for the speaker’s history and a link to both the present situation and the metaphor for her marriage. Since then, I’ve been researching the linking details and thinking about how to integrate them into the details of her history.

Today’s mission was to fill in that gap even if the work was far from polished. The gap has definitely been filled. Again, it’s a matter of waiting a few days to read the poem fresh and have a more objective sense of how to direct my revisions. At this point, I’m thinking it would be helpful to have someone read and comment on it. I’ve got one or possibly two people in mind, and depending on the next round of revision, I may ask them.

I think the next time I work on my book, I want to read the really long poem. The last time I read it, I thought it was just about done. The changes I made involved cutting out excess in the final section. I was only concerned about an important transitional point, where too much snipping could affect pacing.

Puntitas reads _Quiller Salamander_ by A. Hall and _The Zookeeper’s Wife_ by D. Ackerman.